The other infrastructure issue with e-bikes — and I say this as a fan and occasional user of them — is that absent a well-maintained and _large_ bicycling path network, they actively make bicycling worse for both traditional riders and each other.
It’s the car problem in miniature: if you’re the only car on the road, driving is _great_, but driving in rush hour traffic in even small to medium sized cities is miserable. Similarly, if you’re one of the few e-bike riders around, you can cut through cities like a knife. But any non-trivial number of them reveals instantly the hard limits of bike infrastructure that in most cases was a hostile afterthought: having dozens of e-bike riders of varying levels of skills and aggression all easily maintaining speeds of over 20mph on these paths makes for a hair-raising experience as a traditional rider or worse yet a pedestrian on shared paths. And the additional weight of the batteries makes stopping harder and crashes inevitably more injurious.
The smart thing to do here would be to start taking lanes from cars on popular arteries as e-bike traffic ramps up. My expectation is that what we’ll actually get are blanket e-bike bans in a lot of cities instead. (And that’s not even getting into the ugly failure modes of lithium ion batteries — you really should not be charging large ones inside your residence.)
I couldn’t agree more. As somebody who gets around exclusively by bike, it’s hard for me to deny that biking attracts some uniquely incompetent road users. Teenagers and DUI cases are the most obvious, but it seems like a lot of cyclists aren’t playing with a full deck.
And I don’t just mean running red lights or other straightforward traffic violations, but riding on the left side of the road, on the sidewalk, wobbling back and forth, wearing headphones, no lights…
Mercifully, by some law of nature these screwballs invariably bike in a low gear and never go more than 7 miles per hour, so they don’t overwhelm the bike infrastructure and are (usually) easy for cars and other bikes to avoid.
But more and more I’ve been having near misses with supercharged idiots on e-bikes, doing the exact same things, but 3 times faster. And it’s only going to get worse. One way or another, e-bikes are going to have to end up in a different regulatory category than either real bikes or cars.
From my experience, a lot of bikers, normal as well as e-bikes, seem to believe they aren't operating a vehicle. They are instead a fast pedestrian, and do things like pedestrians rather than cars.
They shouldn’t do things like pedestrians *or* like cars because they are neither. Or rather, there are some things they should do like pedestrians *and* cars, some like one, some like the other, and some like neither. All transportation modes have some things in common and some things that are different, and we shouldn’t try to force them into two boxes.
I always thought of the bike as something I could transform easily between vehicle and pedestrian.
When I'm on the bike, I'm a vehicle - I should stay in the bike lane, I should signal my turns, I should stop at stop lights.
But... if I really need to, I can get off the bike and walk with it - now I'm a pedestrian! (Perhaps I really don't want to move left and make a left turn as a bike across this busy intersection but I'm capable of waiting for a walk light)
E-bikes are apparently heavier (45-50 lbs vs 30-35 lbs) than normal bikes, I wonder if that's a problem for some users to just walk with them (especially if grocery laden)
As someone who has ridden a loaded touring bike weighing more than 50 pounds many thousands of miles, I can state with confidence that pushing the bike is noticeably difficult only on steep hills, when the bike is a long cargo bike or a bike with a trailer, or on terrain that is so difficult that it's hard to walk on. Otherwise... the bike has wheels! You can push it. It's not a problem.
They definitely are more difficult to walk with. I know that some come with a "walk mode" you can turn on that engages the motor at a very low speed to make it easier to carry.
Being a pedestrian doesn't require any special skill or licensing.
Being a car driver rightly does.
Maybe e-bikes should require some type of proof of basic competency and licensing?
Normally I would hate to unnecessarily bureaucratized stuff, but if e-bikes do take of and high e-cyclist density becomes a thing, maybe it makes sense?
Edit:
Maybe make the licensing requirements similar to that of motorcycles, but maybe somewhat less stringent.
I suspect (given how much more expensive they are), that the police taking their theft more seriously (because they can prove that they are stolen much more easily than regular bikes) would make a lot of ebike owners accept an obligation to register ownership and pass some sort of minimal road awareness / rules of the road test in exchange.
Even a modest tax ($20-40 pa) - if committed to spend that revenue on bike infrastructure - could be widely accepted; e-bike riders complain a lot about the lack of bike infrastructure.
Liability insurance requirements are probably needed to get insurance companies to offer products at reasonable prices - they will be (rightly) worried about adverse selection when it's optional, and also worried about a market that isn't deep enough to generate enough premiums to be worth their while.
Contrast this with the level of test that should be required to get a driving licence for a car: a theory test where you have to know the rules of all types of junction in your jurisdiction and the rights of way (e.g. when you have to yield to a bike or a pedestrian), the meaning of all the road signs (e.g. stop vs yield, all the warnings and prohibitions, parking rules, etc), a hazard perception test where you face a large number of hazardous situations in a simulator and you have to successfully identify and avoid them, and then a practical driving test of something like 45 minutes on the normal roads, managing through a variety of situations.
You should need to retake the theory test (to ensure you keep up with changes to the law) and the hazard perception test (to ensure your reflexes or vision are not deteriorating) every ten years when you renew the licence.
That's a sort of hybrid of the British and German driving tests, two of the most challenging tests in the world and also two of the safest countries in which to drive. It's also similar to many other particularly safe countries, like Japan, South Korea, or certain other European countries.
but even without crazy behaviour, increased use of bikes and increased speed differences between cyclists mean city would need more space for cyclists? Of course Mat's observation that bikes take less place to park than cars, also applies to space on the road.
My rule is that every commuter--cyclist, motorist, pedestrian, hell even transit rider--is fully capable of doing dumb shit. It's the motorists that need to be held to the highest standard because they're the ones that can cause the most damage.
Like, I can see riding around new/returning/bad riders being super annoying but what is the realistic worst-case scenario? Absent cars, Its way, way better than even a reasonably bad accident caused by the same kind of drivers.
These problems definitely apply for the larger e-bikes.
I think for slower pedal-assist e-bikes (usually up to around 15mph), what they basically do is turn any person into a fit cyclist. If the infrastructure can’t sustain a lot of fit cyclists going at fast but normal speeds, then I think encouraging any kind of cycling is hopeless, it can only ever be a niche activity.
Often this just means we need to improve the infrastructure. Whenever I’m biking on a lovely trail (like the Ballona Creek path in Los Angeles or the path around town lake in Austin) I imagine what it would be like to have this as my daily commute, and then imagine what it would be like for 10,000 people to have this as their daily commute, which obviously should be a goal. None of them are sized to work for that though.
Just so we're on the same page, I presume that you anticipate that the effect of having it be 10,000 people's daily commute is that it would go from being a lovely experience to an unlovely, stressful and utiliarian one of constantly avoiding other cyclists in a free for all with more of the character of a daily grind than a pleasure ride, albeit offset by significant benefits to the health of the commuters and their capacity to get from one point to another without having either to run a car (public benefit) or sit in maddening LA traffic (private benefit), integrated over a large number of riders, thus making it net positive? EDIT: also probably would decrease the amount of per-rider subsidy dollars for bike path funding and maintenance as an additional benefit, although tbh I have no idea how much of an expenditure bike path maintenance is, especially in areas where you don't get frost heaving.
FURTHER EDIT: re-reading this I think this comes across as more tendentious than I intended to it to be -- to be clear, I don't necessarily disagree with the calculus above (in fact, I strongly suspect it would pencil out for exactly the stated reasons), I really am just trying to confirm that you were trying to juxtapose the tradeoffs of an individual commute versus the tradeoffs required to scale up the paths in question and what you perceived those tradeoffs to be, but that may have been a misreading.
Ah, sorry - no, what I anticipated as the effect of having it be 10,000 people's daily commute is that people would be constantly knocked off the edge of the path into the creek at the moments that they aren't stuck in congestion. The trails aren't anywhere near wide enough to play the role that they should ideally be able to play. Ideally they should be thinking about the widening now before there are large numbers of people relying on them for daily travel.
I have a low-power ebike and a comfort analog bike and I use Strava to record on both. My average speed on the ebike is around 12-13 mph, and on the comfort bike about 8 mph. I regularly get passed by road cyclists on both.
(My bike is a type 1 with a 250W motor, so it provides assist up to 20mph but I can’t usually reach that speed. Except on downhills, but that’s not am ebike thing.)
More people = more conflicts, but the human and other costs of even an ebike conflict pale in comparison to what we accept on a daily basis with cars.
That's what a road diet is. The most common example is to take a traditional 4 lane road (which is 2 lanes in each direction), a very dangerous setup for everyone, including cars who run a higher risk of rear ending a left turner waiting for opposing traffic to clear, and convert them to one lane in each direction, a center turn lane, and repurpose the 4th lane for two bike lanes in each direction.
As for e-bike regulation, I'm fine with something like a 20 mph speed limit on devices, and anything faster than that gets classified like any other motorcycle. I'm hopeful something like that will not cause too many people to lose their shit.
I agree 25mph is doable on a 750W ebike with a strong rider. I agree 25mph would be dangerous on a crowded bike path. But I commute to work on a bike path and I have never once seen anyone do 25. The good club riders are faster than the ebikes.
It just seems like much ado about nothing, but a 20mph limit would be fine with me.
It is for sure true that I was doing higher speeds (average and top speed) under human power on a 16 lb carbon-fiber bike then I’ve ever hit on my ebike.
Yes, I don't have a strong opinion on the precise MPH. I'm sure someone much better at the intersection of physics and biology can determine a proper safe limit.
In my experience, as more people adopt cycling the conscientiousness of the average cyclist rises. In cities where the infrastructure makes cycling very dangerous, only people who like dangerous, risky activities (young men and people with suspended licenses, mainly) ride bikes. And they ride dangerously and riskily. In places where cycling is safe and normal people do it, the average cyclist is more likely to be a safe, normal person.
Yeah. I have met people who went to an ebike because too many DUI's.
When I was young I took too many risks on my bike. This was back when way fewer people rode bikes. At the same time I presented little risk to others riding on the street with cars. From society's standpoint it was safer keeping the young me on a bike than letting me get a car.
Now cycling is way more common and there is much more of a culture of care.
Ultimately there's a limit on how finely you can dice up a street for different users. In a lot of places the messy but probably most workable solution is to slow cars down dramatically and then share the space.
Agreed. And in certain areas, just... get rid of the cars entirely. Obviously not a workable solution for Phoenix or Atlanta, but the fact that we let people drive into downtown Manhattan, Boston and Philadelphia (all of which have street grids explicitly designed for _horses_) is just madness.
I don't disagree with congestion pricing, or even banning cars in some areas, but I do think politically its much better to stay focused on the low-hanging fruit of legalizing the construction of new housing/allowing multi-family uses of old housing - without parking minimums, especially with regard to state and federal level policy.
Redesigning the area between Girard Ave, Washington Ave, and the rivers to be non-car would be an interesting exercise, except that we'd have to raze the blocks immediately to the north and south of those boundaries and fill them with 5-story parking garages.
Better to implement congestion pricing on 76, 676, US-1, and 95, and zoned/geofenced entry pricing on the rest of the city.
Honestly with Philly I think just keeping private cars off the old city / center city grid would be a massive improvement, but yeah it's hard to imagine _any_ scheme that wouldn't run into a buzzsaw of political opposition and in fact a lot of the winds seem to be blowing in the opposite direction right now.
First, Manhattan's geography and transit provision lend themselves to just saying "park on the other side of the moat and take the train". It's politically impossible but physically more doable than applying that rule to Center City and Old City.
In Philly you'd basically have to commit to no private cars in Center/Old City *and parts south* between the rivers, which is borderline impossible. The infrastructure doesn't exist to support it, and building that infrastructure requires you to reengineer the city away from cars. Chicken and egg at its finest.
The second is that, due to the density of the retail businesses, in both cases we'd still need to maintain the road infrastructure, and it would see very nearly as much wear and tear in many locales (even a small box truck causes an order of magnitude more degradation to pavement than a car), but utilization would be teeny-weeny.
In that context, it makes more sense to price use in a way that allows us to wring utility from those assets rather than just constraining use.
But... if we were to set zonal entry pricing, thereby lowering traffic volumes, and reorient mass transit to serve these transportation needs, then in time we might be able to reach an endgame where every fifth street is a BRT right-of-way and the other four alternate between pedestrian-only and full vehicle access, with no long-term on-street parking at all.
Yeah, probably fair on all counts. I've been out of philly long enough that I'm only tangentially plugged in to the current state of affairs -- is Chestnut Street still a busway these days or did they give up on that?
Not my experience at all here in Seattle, ebike central. Ebikes on the hills are faster, but still slow (under 10mph).
I see ebikes that might go 20mph on the flat. but few, and I see club riders who go 20 as well. Eay more typical is a parent lugging groceries or a toddler on a cargo bike.
I would be fine with laws limiting assist to 20mph or even 15.5mph as they do in Europe, but what I see in these comments is a focus on outliers. Aggressive people cause problems everywhere, I'd rather see an amped-up 22 year old on an ebike (25mph topped out, oh my) than behind the wheel of a Camaro.
There's also quite a bit of variability in the handling of e-bikes. I bought the cheap one from REI which is working great to get me into the office while my metro line is closed for 7 months (thanks WMATA). But while I feel quite confident in my bike handling ability as a former racing cyclist, I really worry about new riders on a bike that accelerates powerfully and has small wheels and a high center of gravity on our bumpy roads and bike paths next to 50 MPH highways.
My dream bike to tote around the kids is a Dutch Bakfiets style with the front wheelbarrow for cargo, but that is some serious $$$$$.
I think the upright / step through frame design to make it universal frame size means when I ride it as a taller person much of my body weight is higher up relative to the frame. It just feels relatively less in control than a traditional bike.
Good point. You needs enough clearance so the pedals don't hit the ground, the rest of center of gravity is governed by your body way more than the bike.
"the additional weight of batteries makes ... crashes more injurious" The weight of a bike plus rider, even an e-bike plus rider, is mostly rider. Say a bike weighs 25 pounds, an e-bike adds 30 pounds, and a rider weighs 175 pounds. So crashes with an e-bike have 15% more energy. That's more or less in the noise.
One of the dumber parts of the struggle to get rid of parking requirements is that cities will often grant exemptions to them if developers grant certain concessions, so now groups that benefit from those concessions fight to keep them. So now we have some "Affordable Housing" organizations fighting to keep them.
Even after reading this, I still don't get e-bikes.
In my 20's I rode a motorcycle and didn't have a car. I liked riding bikes and thought having a motorcycle would be a counter-cultural thing to do. When you ride a motorcycle, you have to wear a helmet in my state. While carrying that helmet, people will approach you unbidden to tell you how a loved one of theirs was killed or maimed on a motorcycle. This leads many, myself included, to buy leather jackets, chaps, boots, and various armors.
Once, I strapped my backpack to the back of my motorcycle poorly, and it fell off but dangled by a bungee for a short distance while being pulled across the pavement at low speed. It was absolutely shredded. This made an impression on me.
Eventually, I decided that rather than don all of this uncomfortable gear and still suffer considerable worry and discomfort, I'd sell my motorcycle and get a sedan. It was a vast improvement on nearly every front excluding the coolness and fun fronts.
I still bike commuted for years in sun, rain and winter, but eventually I had one close call too many. The roads get more and more congested, and all it takes is one idiot to gift you a permanent and/or serious injury. I gave it up with reservation.
So I see e-bikes, and I say, what is this? Is this a slow motorcycle? If so, why isn't this person wearing at least the safety gear of a person on a moped? Why is this slow motorcycle operating on the same pedestrian path my toddler is wobbling down? In the biking community there is a stigma against riding down the sidewalk "like a child". The e-bike community seems to be holding on to the illusion that they are bikers, not motor vehicles. But if you operate at motor vehicle speed, you need to be in the road like a car. Stop operating your e-bike on bike paths "like a child".
The e-bikers might reply, "well, I don't feel safe in the road!" And they would be wise to say that. They can't maintain the speed of traffic around them generally, so they force traffic to take risky actions to get around them. One often has the same trouble on a road bike. In the best case scenario where they are keeping pace with traffic, they are usually doing so in sandals, shorts, and a tee-shirt.
So I don't know, it's a free country I guess, ride your ebike. Yet, if someone offered me a motorcycle that I could ride and get light exercise, I'd still say no. I'll get my light exercise in a way that is less likely to kill or maim me. Meanwhile, please keep your motor vehicle off pedestrian paths. Be an adult! Like, if one saw a guy riding his motorcycle at 15-20 mph down my pedestrian path, one would surely think, "that guy is an asshole." That's what I think about you when I see you on a one-wheel or a e-bike anywhere but in a road for motor vehicles.
I'll wrap this up by saying that my old boss, the man that convinced me to not be a wimp and buy the motorcycle in the first place, wrecked his motorcycle last year and lost a foot. He walks on a prosthetic now, but it causes him significant pain, and he's suffering depression as a result. A truck with a trailer pulled out in front of him or something. Might have been the car drivers fault, might not have been, but either way, a small error and a moment of lack of focus cost a man his foot.
What makes motorcycles so dangerous is their speeds. Traveling at 60-70 mph without the armor of a full-sized car is nuts.
But, at 20 mph, the risk level is much less, and you don't need all the fancy gear that motorcycle riders use. Assuming, of course, that there are safe places to ride at a 20 mph place, without 40 mph cars hitting you.
"They can't maintain the speed of traffic around them generally, so they force traffic to take risky actions to get around them."
They do not force traffic to take risks to get around them. If you cannot overtake a vehicle safely, then you must slow down to the speed of that vehicle until it is safe to do so.
If you don't like that or find it frustrating, then you need to control yourself; if you can't control yourself, you should surrender your license, sell your car and stop driving because you are a danger to everyone else on the road.
Having been a biker, I'm quite considerate. Most drivers are not.
For those words to have meaning, someone would have to enforce them. Sadly, our police force has given up on enforcing traffic laws in my burg. Even less are they concerned for the welfare of some weirdo biker.
Have you ever been a pedestrian and found the behavior you are chiding me to observe to be observed by all drivers on the road? As a pedestrian in traffic, if even 10% don't follow your edicts, the pedestrian is in danger.
I'll grant you my language was colloquial. Car drivers are not forced. They are 'compelled'. Compelled by selfishness, ignorance, ambivalence, malevolence or distraction; the reason doesn't matter if you're the pedestrian in traffic.
100% feel this. I understand people’s true point that cars are the statistically most dangerous thing to pedestrians, but in my every day lived experience cars don’t zoom past me on the sidewalk at a speed that could kill me one second after a brief ring of their bell. Regular bikers doing this was bad enough
If you liked riding a motorcycle, I think you'd like riding an ebike! For me, it's the difference between a 10 minute effortless and a 15 minute regular effort bike trip to the grocery store. That doesn't seem like much, but from a planning perspective it's like the difference between a 10 minute walk and 10 minute jog: with one you're going to be walking around hot and sweaty at the end.
For the safety piece you can slice it lots of different ways. My parents are big road cyclers, and when I got my first motorcycle they were aghast I would do something so dangerous, and I was aghast they'd been riding on the roadways with no more protection than a foam helmet and spandex. Hitting a patch of gravel going downhill will take you out either way, but I'm going to be sliding on kevlar with 100% of my skin covered.
To answer your question on if it's a fast bike / slow motorcylce I think the class 1/2/3 ebike classification is a good start, but needs a lot more enforcement. Class 1/2 ebikes that are mostly pedal assist and limited to 20mph should be able to use a bike path, and class 3 ebikes that are limited at 25mph+ with mostly throttle control should be roadway only, imo. No one should be riding bikes on sidewalks, too.
I guess the question of fast bike vs slow motorcycle was rhetorical, as I have my mind made up. But a better analogy would be that an e-bike is like a poorly maintained moped. A moped with a poorly functioning motor and on which all of the lights/signals that make it street legal have fallen into disrepair. That moped would not be welcome on a bike path. Nor would it be safe to operate on the street.
As Matt said, an e-bike is a bicycle that climbs hills easier. I have a bike and an ebike, live around a lot of hills, and I'm 63. I won't commute on my bike, there is a killer hill and I'm just not up to it. I do commute on my ebike, it tames the hill. An ebike is not a slow motorcycle, at all. A Honda C70 Passport is a slow motorcycle (I had one). A C70 drives with cars, it takes up a lane, you have to match prevailing speed. An ebike rides off to the side so cars can pass (20mph is fast for an ebike) or in a bike lane.
An ebike is a bicycle that helps you climb hills. Is it safe? Not really, neither are regular bicycles. More dangerous than a regular bike? No, about the same. A safety comparison between ebikes and motorcycles is a category error.
"They can't maintain the speed of traffic around them generally, so they force traffic to take risky actions to get around them. One often has the same trouble on a road bike. In the best case scenario where they are keeping pace with traffic, they are usually doing so in sandals, shorts, and a tee-shirt."
This sounds like a screed against bicycles, and I have heard it before. Plenty of motorists don't like bikes on the road, never have and never will.
Also there is no "best-case scenario" where bikes keep pace with traffic. They can't and they don't. ebike or regular bike they just don't have the power.
It's not a slow motorcycle, it's a fast bicycle. The pedal assist bikes Matt is talking about top out at 15-20 mph. This is slower than a quick pedal powered cyclist. If you would allow a road cyclist, you should allow 750W e-bike
I am a long time bike commuter in Minneapolis, and I'm noticing more e-bikes out there on the bike paths. Like other commenters, I have a few safety concerns. But, to be honest, I am probably biased because I find it irritating to be passed by some out of shape person who isn't even pedaling. Some pettiness may be coloring my perspective. So I try to be a little more fair-minded.
The truth is that riding any kind of bike is a fairly dangerous activity, but, on balance, getting more people out there using bikes to get around has got to be a good thing. Safety concerns can be addressed. For example, maybe ebikes could have speed limiters that prevent them going more than maybe 15 mph. Or maybe the electric assist automatically turns off when the bike is going downhill.
And we are far from having bike lanes that are too crowded for both ebikes and regular bikes. More and more people who bike regularly should lead to more development of safer places to ride, like protected bike lanes.
(Now, when it comes to e-mountain bikes on dirt trails built for human powered bikes, I embrace my pettiness. I have zero patience for people who spend $10,000 on what is effectively a motorbike because they are too lazy to huff and puff up the hills with the rest of us.)
I get what you are saying about the irritation. On my ebike I get passed by club riders, and I could use more assist and pass them, but I don't because that would be rude. I get that.
At the same time I have yet to see the mythical ebiker on a hopped-up machine terrorizing other cyclist on the bike path.
Inclusivity is best. Cycling is helped by more cyclists, even if they are on ebikes. Cycling culture should be about consideration, that means no whizzing close by pedestrians, ebike or no ebike.
I feel similarly. I bought a good bike for commuting and riding longer distances for recreation and then the pandemic came and the need to commute went away, but I do ride for hours on our very nice long bike trail that runs along the American River and I just find it strange how many ebikes are out there on a weekend because it seems like recreation but they are not really pedaling and when you pass them they seem to be annoyed and speed up and it's just strange to see someone barely pedaling and going kind of fast -- I think they make perfect sense for commuting and there are plenty of folks who use that trail to commute during the week but I just kind of wish on the weekend that the trail was for bikers and runners and walkers (I find the roller bladers kind of irritating because they take up so much space but I grudgingly acknowledge that they should also be welcome) and not for vehicles with motors. But I don't have a good reason for this -- it is probably pettiness.
I think about it like this: Would it be ok for someone to be riding a motorcycle with you on that path? What about a scooter? What about a broken down scooter that could only do 20 mph and had no turn signals or lights? How about a 2-stroke, gas powered moped?
My answer to all of these is: no, it would not be ok. So where is the line that separates an e-bike, or even an electric one-wheel, from these clearer examples of prohibited traffic?
My answer is: a class 1 (20 MPH, pedal-assist) ebike is fine everywhere a regular bicycle is, for all the reasons listed above -- normal bikes routinely reach this speed among even the moderately-fit.
A class 2 (throttle-controlled bike) is a motorcycle regardless of top speed and should be treated as such (or as a moped, if such a thing is licensed in your jurisdiction). Maybe that means it's allowed on a multi-mode path if it's got a speed limiter, or maybe not. No strong opinion there. Where I live, throttle-controlled vehicles (ebikes, mopeds, dirt bikes, etc.) are not permitted on multi-mode paths, though in practice I don't see much enforcement on electric bikes (vs gas-powered bikes, where there definitely is enforcement).
A class (28 MPH, pedal-assist) ebike is the grey zone. Most cyclists (if you include occasional and recreational cyclists) do not achieve this speed except on downhills, and it's far in excess of what's reasonable on sidewalks or on multi-use trails that aren't bicycle-only. I think these should probably not be allowed on trails/sidewalks where pedestrians are allowed, but I also think it's clearly a grey area and people will have differing opinions.
I've commute biked on human power ever since I was a teenager, and since I'm Matt's age, I'm starting to realize that at some point, hopefully not too soon, I'll need an e-bike just because I'll get too old for a regular one.
Surely it's more like 1.9 -- the average number of feet per person is less than 2 after all. (Now I'm imagining a ration coupon regime in which everyone receives two footwear coupons -- one per shoe -- and there's an active market for spare coupons from amputees and other people with fewer than two feet.)
There's a lot that could be said about this topic, much of it by people with more information than I have, although I did have the experience of using a non-E bike (exclusively) for nine months in the late aughts, but the three chief concerns that I think would benefit form being addressed beyond better route infrastructure (which many commenters are correctly already discussing and is obviously incredibly important for both safety and convenience / desirability) are:
(1) Better prosecution of bike thievery. Having an expensive but easily (and frequently) stolen capital asset is a huge problem and a massive disincentive to own a bike in an urban area. This seems like both an enforcement and a legislative problem.
(2) Parking for bicycles: especially with thievery as a problem, but even without, there's just not a great way to *store* bikes at most destinations, whether commercial or business, and they're enough of a size and hassle to make "grin and bear it" or similar ad-hoc solutions like wrestling a bike onto the elevator and keeping it in one's office impractical
(3) The Achilles' heel of the bicycle is that it is *incredibly* ill-suited to carrying heavy and/or bulky items (let alone other people), but you're not going to find a more efficient way in either monetary or time savings to buy paper towels than a Costco run. This doesn't make bikes a poor choice for commuting in instances where that isn't a concern, and so there can be beneficial effects of replacing the marginal car trip with the marginal bike trip, but it makes the bike impractical as a car replacement to the incredibly wide class of transportation problems that aren't "depart and return as a single person who is at most lightly laden." Certainly lots of trips do fit that bill -- e.g., office worker commutes -- but the upper bound of bike utility for transport just doesn't seem high enough to have much of an effect on product-based commerce (but maybe it could for service-based ones catering to individuals?)
In the modern world, I don't consider Costco runs sufficient justification to buy a car anymore. Anything you could possibly buy at Costco, you can order online and have it delivered to you. Even if you pay more, you're still saving huge amounts of money compared to car ownership.
My personal opinion is that, if you want to buy a car (at least, if you live in a city), the justification for the purchase needs to be based on experiences, rather than things. For example, hiking, skiing, visiting family and friends at the opposite end of town, are all good reasons to own a car. Carrying paper towels home from a store half a mile away. Not so much.
Car clubs (zipcar) that let you rent a car by the hour are a great solution to the Costco run or the IKEA run.
If you're doing that sort of run more than once a month, then you might start thinking that owning a car makes sense - but also, who the hell does that sort of run more than once a month anyway?
Bike theft is absolutely a huge problem towards more widespread adoption. E-bikes especially are targets because they're lightweight (read as "can be tossed in the back of a pickup"), expensive, and easy to part out or resell.
Los Angeles has a new law that makes the parting-out of bikes in public illegal as an excuse to crack down on homeless chop shops, but e-bikes have valuable enough components that it can be done by people with a business or house. Some newer e-bikes have GPS tracking installed in their valuable components, and AirTags and the like are a good solution for even cheap bikes. I hope law enforcement adapts to what's going to be a common situation of "Someone stole my bike, this is where GPS says it is, can you investigate ASAP before the tracker is destroyed".
Those bike racks suck and are terrible. If you see those racks in the wild, you'll see cyclists park parallel to them, because if you park in the way the rack is (mis)designed, your bike will tip over.
Staples. Staples are the answer. Not bike racks that suck and were designed by people who don't use bike racks. https://huntco.com/staple-bike-rack
Huh, I've never had any problems with the racks I mentioned. The racks you mention are fine too, though I wonder about the difference in bikes per unit of area.
Do you typically load up your bike with groceries or any other kind of load? Do you have a front rack, basket or handlebar bag? Once you put a load on the bike, it has a tendency to twist and fall on that kind of rack.
> The problem is that the technological transition to the Automobile Era coincided with the rise of a very prescriptive land use planning regime.
Instead it’s the rise of cars that created an ever more restrictive land-use, transportation, and planning regime. There are many reasons for this but the biggest is that cars are outrageously dangerous and car crashes kill tons of people. In the 20’s they put up monuments in a bunch of cities memorializing all the children slain by reckless motorists.
But cars are useful, and the motorist lobby successfully engineered regulatory capture over the entire transportation/land-use world by positioning the entire problem as obsolete development patterns and careless pedestrians, and technocrats of the era responded by building stricter and stricter prescriptions to require what we now think of as “normal suburbia” to be built, and to be the only thing that can be built, on the theory that it would be better for everyone.
This same era of technocrats later instituted redlining, saw the freeways as a convenient mechanism to demolish and wall off the black and brown neighborhoods, and bulldozed a lot of what was left to build the notorious “tower in a park” housing projects. Really a profoundly terrible legacy.
Depends on which public transit you're talking about. If it's diesel powered and isn't ridden all that much, it's actually increasing use of fossil fuels, and should make Big Oil quite happy.
There’s a lot here that I agree with, as a bike commuter of over 15 years. One topic that goes unaddressed is space usage on the ROAD. It’s taken forever to get solid bicycling infrastructure in a few cities. Introducing a bunch of electric scooters and bikes creates a third mode of traffic - going much faster than the bicyclists a lot of the time, and too slow for the cars. It is a markedly more dangerous commute with them on the road. There are a lot of accidents.
My city is now considering banning the scooter rentals because they’re a real hazard, and not only because of space usage. Due to the low barrier to entry, they’re often ridden by people who have no idea what they’re doing, are drunk, and don’t wear helmets. (This is also a problem with by-the-ride bike rental, but the physical work involves operates as a natural constraint on numbers.)
Not wearing seatbelts at least has a negative externality because your unrestrained body might damage other passengers in the car. There are no such externalities for bike helmets for people with private insurance plans. If Blue Shield says I should have a helmet I'll put one on but the city government? None of their business.
There's still a negative externality, though: Joe and Bob have both been paying insurance premiums. They both get in accidents. Joe was wearing a helmet and only needed stitches. Bob wasn't wearing a helmet and required $1.8 million in healthcare and rehab over a three year period. And will never pay taxes again because he can't work.
I'd say Bob's an example of a negative externality.
The state claiming your current labor in the form of taxes is bad enough. The state claiming an interest in your future labors and restricting you from making decisions that might reduce your future productivity is just Orwellian.
If it bothers you, I guess you can ignore the productivity part and concentrate on the healthcare part. Harm minimization policies are fairly standard in all developed countries, the most prominent examples of which are pigovian taxes on alcohol and tobacco.
It's not really *only* between you and the insurance company. Although healthcare capacity can obviously be expanded over time, at any one snapshot in time, that resources is finite, and so your preventable head injury taxes the capacity of the system writ large, thereby weakening it for others (however imperceptibly).
I think one can make a principled argument for the libertarian position in the hypothetical we're discussing, mind you. Truly I do. But what you can't plausibly do is make the case that helmet mandates have no basis in terms of rational, cost/benefit analysis. Better just to say the material benefit doesn't justify the massive assault on freedom.
That is absolutely not an externality. The costs and benefits are internalized by Bob here. You may as well say that me not wanting to date someone is an externality, because I am depriving someone of contact with me.
If the insurance company wished, they can give different premium rates for different behavior — perhaps they can require you install a camera on the bike in exchange for a steep discount. You have an argument for externalities in healthcare if and only if we have public funding of healthcare.
Reducing bad head injuries *absolutely* reduces the strain on the healthcare system, even if every single person buys robust health insurance. This isn't controversial. Think about it.
If you want to suggest a term other than "externality" fire away—I'm not hung up on semantics.
I can appreciate this perspective, while also stating that as a society we have rejected this approach. You don't just have to wear a seatbelt if there are other passengers, but also if you are alone. Which is one of many examples where the state requires you to take personal safety precautions.
Not everyone has rejected this. Bike helmets are not mandatory in most cities and seat belts are not mandatory in NH. They're also not mandatory in the Netherlands despite them having the largest biking population per capita in the world.
If they were riding safely, I would care less. But as a citizen, I have a preference for not having bloody brains all over the street because an idiot scootered against traffic.
If we want to regulate vehicles that cause bloody brains all over the street, we need to look right past those scooters and at cars. Drivers are the killers here, not scooter riders.
How many bike injuries have you seen in your life? 99.9% of them don't involve any "bloody brains", unlike car accidents, simply because the speeds are too low.
I’ve seen quite a few, having cycled thousands of miles. Most experienced cyclist wear helmets, though, which dramatically reduces the rate of brain injury. There have been some very ugly incidents involving drunken scooter riders in my city. Perhaps I should mention that the city is considering this ban in the very busy tourist district. They don’t care what you do in your cul-de-sac or residential neighborhood. But yeah, the accidents are serious and a significant quality of life issue in the city.
What is your city, and how many accidents involving drivers hitting pedestrians and cyclists have there been in the time that there have been some ugly incidents with drunken scooters? How many pedestrians and cyclists have been killed by drivers, while you were worrying about scooters?
After the introduction of Lime, Byrd, and the other e-scooters in my city circa 2019, ER intake went up by some rather large number due to accidents involving e-scooter riders. Doesn’t seem good to have ER beds tied up w riders of these things.
The crowding issue is a problem, but I'm optimistic that every new rider is one more advocate for new and better bike lanes. Cities weren't redesigned around cars until they went from a toy for the rich to transportation for the masses. It's not going to be overnight but ebikes are growing the share of frequent riders.
* A normal parking space is...180 square feet? That's the smallest number I am seeing on google. That's just the parking space. That's doesn't account for the other space in the parking lot the cars to dive through -- more than doubling the space needed for each sparking space.
* The average rental apartment seems to be under 900 square feet.
* This suggests that a 5 story apartment building would need twice as much space on the ground, simply to to allow for the parking spaces -- assuming just one car per apartment. (If you look at aeriel views of apartment developments, you see that the parking lots are VASTLY larger than the buildings themselves.
Honestly, I think that Matt has failed to connect these numbers to height limits on buildings. When the expectation is street parking, there's some efficiency on space but there is also a hard upper limit on available spaces. Street parking in Brooklyn probably only allows for like...two floors of apartments (at one car/apartment). Maybe three?
Why would you assume one car per apartment when there are ample ways to get around in Brooklyn without owning a car?
On Saturday, my wife and I took our three kids to Yankee Stadium to see NYCFC destroy the "New York" Red Bulls, and we didn't want to take our infant on the subway, so we got a ZipCar.
On Sunday, we met friends at a park, and it was a little far for my three-year-old to walk, so we took the bus.
This morning, I rode a Citi Bike to the subway.
Cars are convenient. I might get one some day. But I've lived in Brooklyn for 15 years without one.
Figure that a normal parking space is 350-380 square feet, counting circulation. But we need housing for people, not housing for cars. If someone wants to own a car, fine. If someone wants to build apartments with parking for cars, fine. But we have no business telling developers that they need to provide more parking than they think they can sell to their buyers/renters. Charge for street parking, let developers decide how much parking to provide, and let drivers figure it out.
Love that e-bikes are part of the discussion even in these circles! I’ve been riding them for 6 years now. Early adopter because I live in East Harlem and there were tons of delivery guys on them and I just thought they seemed cool. For me it was all about how quickly I could get to the pool where I swim (1.5 miles away) and volleyball leagues around the city (.5 to 2 miles away). The ebike proved amazing for both. I had kids 5 years ago and quickly started bringing my daughter everywhere (daycare and errands) on the bike. When we had our second, we got the radwagon and it has become our “bus” for getting the kids everywhere. A couple things make this doable for us: 1) we live on the first floor of our condo building. Bringing these big heavy bikes in and out can be hard for people who live in walk ups. We need to build better safety storage for bikes. I leave the bikes out during the day (locked) and then bring in at the end of the day. 2) we have bike lanes all around East Harlem and there are so many bikes that people GENERALLY are pretty respectful of bikes.
I was always struck that the Dutch don’t wear helmets despite being a bike culture. Then I realized that when everyone rides bikes, car drivers are also bike riders and they are very aware of bikes as a result. You need less safety mechanisms. This is becoming more true in NYC, but still far from widespread enough. The white bikes you see on corners are memorials of where deaths on bikes have happened and they are far to frequent to be comfortable.
The radwagon is so popular and cool that I use it to bring my daughter and two of her friends from school to their afterschool program. Saving other parents the trip and also getting them there super quickly.
I rode motorcycles growing up (stopped when I moved to NYC 20 years ago after a few close calls) and I think the speed and power of an ebike feels relaxed compared to the motorcycles I used to ride. But I’m very aware of how frightening they can be to pedestrians and bike riders due to the speed. Hopefully this awareness builds are more people ride and it becomes more common.
Finally - alternate street parking is like my biggest complaint about NYC. It seems SOOOO dumb to charge nothing for something so valuable. To take such valuable space for cars when garage parking is $300-750/month (more in some places) is just insane. Tax revenue, additional bikes lanes. More spaces for outdoor dining. More pedestrian spaces, less congestion. Who advocates for free parking?
Non-affluent New Yorkers who can't find $7k in their annual budget for private parking, and the politicians who depend on their votes. That's who.
This past summer Matt Y. detailed a proposal that might address the constituent capture issues buttressing the insane policy of giving away precious city street space. He was talking about DC and other cities with similar, resident parking permit programs. Not sure if it would work in the context of NYC.(No permits there, right? You don't even have to have NY plates, IIRC).
My landlady is a judge. She has her nanny do the "street-cleaning shuffle" for her every week, which involves sitting in the car to look like you are going to move it when the street-cleaning comes by so you don't have to give up your free parking spot.
unfortunately it isn’t non-affluent parkers (at least not in my neighborhood). Here, people basically pay someone (less than garage parking, but not an insignificant amount), to move their car. We have a “fix a flat” on our block and the guys who run it, who are basically out front of the shop all day, basically run the parking on our street. They collect money from some people to move the cars and they provide it free to others who are “part of the community”. We actually got this offered to us, as we are super friendly, but we declined because we pay for parking at a garage nearby and it is fairly reasonable and we prefer that the service be for people who need it more.
There are no permits in NYC. You just have to move your car for 1.5 hours every two days. That is the “use tax” - and it is incredibly inefficient.
Sure. I didn't mean to denigrate the socioeconomic attributes of your neighborhood. Instead of "non-affluent" I guess I should have written something like "price conscious."
Dutch & helmets: there's another side to it. I grew up in the Netherlands and have practically biked all my life. When people starting using helmets (1995?), this felt incredibly wimpy. But for me, skiing with a helmet, I've always done that but I started in my 30s. Around that time, I met a lifelong skier and she thought skiers with helmets were wimps while biking with a helmet made perfect sense.
Love the article. Our cargo e-bike has been a game changer in our ability to be a one-car family. And tons of them are now appearing at our kids’ school.
Parking minimums are slowly being torn down in our city — can’t wait to see where this all goes.
Has Matt's post got you interested in ebiking? I'm 63, I live in a hilly area, I have an ebike, and I'm an engineer who understands what matters in an ebike.
Matt is 100% correct that the biggest benefit of an ebike is climbing hills. If I commuted around Amsterdam I wouldn't bother. With a regular bike I go 15mph on the flat, double the power on an ebike and go 20, it makes a few minutes difference on a commute. But climbing hills, it is really hard to climb a long hill on a bicycle! So if you live where it is flat and you don't ride your bike you might not ride your new ebike either. But if hills are killing you it makes a huge difference.
So what ebike to buy? The expensive ones put the motor at the cranks (called mid-drive). This is best for climbing steep hills because shifting gears helps you and the motor, both can spin faster even as the bike slows down. Cheaper ones put the motor in the hub, when you slow on a hill the motor slows too, it generates less power and can overheat if you push it too hard. So mid-drive is better, but hub drive is cheaper. The decision comes to hills. If your area has mild hills hub drive can be fine (more on this to come), if you have steep long hills mid-drive might be necessary. How do you know if you have steep hills? If you have a derailleur bike and on the hills you shift to 1st and it is still hard going you have steep hills. If 1st climbs the hill OK but you are now at walking speed and balancing the bike gets hard you have steep hills. If your experience is less severe hub drive is probably fine.
Another thing that costs money is a torque sensor. This is a sensor at the cranks that senses how hard you are pushing on the pedals. With a torque sensor the ebike multiplies your effort. It is pretty wonderful, like riding a bike except you are way more fit. Cheaper ebikes drop the torque sensor and use a simpler sensor that monitors how fast the cranks are turning. If you start climbing a hill a torque sensor ebike can tell and it puts on more power. A crank speed ebike can't tell. To get more power you manually increase the assist on the control screen. In the end a torque sensor feels better but both work. Mid-drives tend to have torque sensors built-into the drive. Hub drive torque sensors are a separate and most hub drive ebikes go for the cheaper solution, but this is just market pressure, torque sensor hub drive exists and works fine.
If you buy a hub drive the manufacturer will tout a top speed. You might think 25mph is better than 20mph, but the opposite is true. In real biking the only time you go 25 is down a hill and you don't need the motor. A hub motor geared for a 25mph top speed is worse on the hills, on a hill the motor wants a low gear for the same reason you do. An ideal hub motor top speed would be 18mph. 18mph is plenty fast on a bicycle and the lower gearing really helps on the hills. But you won't find an 18mph hub drive bike, 18mph top speed sounds lame and 25mph sounds better in the showroom.
E-bikers don't have a natural political constituency to advocate for them, either. The traditional bicycling advocacy groups tend to be dominated by the spandex set, and are at best ambivalent to e-bikes.
E-bikers, get involved in your local bike advocacy group! We need supply side reform (more bike infrastructure) not rationing and austerity (banning e-bikes from existing trails).
Absent in this discussion are kick scooters (esp. electrical kick scooters): here, they are mostly operated through sharing apps and they seem to fill a big need but create a mess as their users manage to act like very fast pedestrians on the pavements, chaotic cyclists on cycle paths and erratic or near-suicidal drivers on the road.
100%. In our neighborhood e-scooters are taking off with teenagers (who can’t yet drive, don’t have their own car, etc). Lots of them around the high school.
As long as they’re being safe, this could be a game-changer for parents.
I wish I had more time to talk about this subject, because it's one that's very dear to my heart, so all I'll say as a top level comment for now is that I'm so excited that you've gotten into cycling, Matt, and I'm glad you acknowledge how scarce space needs to be reallocated to not make everything so dang car-centric.
Unpopular opinion: The aggressive biking and biking setups in Amsterdam makes being a pedestrian more dangerous. Copenhagen seemed to have a better model.
When you say “more dangerous” you should be clear about the comparison. You mean more dangerous than Copenhagen but surely less dangerous than New York, let alone your average American suburb.
Yeah I mean there’s basically no way being hit by a pedal bike is going to result in death, whereas American roads are currently full on mad max since the pandemic.
Um... you've not noticed large numbers people driving like complete and utter maniacs in literally every kind of setting?
I was on US-1, which is one of a handful of corridors in PA with significant camera enforcement for signals and speed limits, and some dude in what appeared to be a very dinged up Dodge Charger was dodging in and out of traffic at around 85 MPH (speed limit 45), with a plate cover so dark it was basically opaque.
Because of the traffic lights I actually was basically keeping pace with him for a while, then he finally ducked around a cop and gunned it... when he realized his mistake he mounted the grass median between the main and auxiliary roadways to try to run.
At 60-80 MPH and a very shallow angle of approach... a Charger has 4ish inches of ground clearance and the Philly PD Explorers have 8 inches, so this ended badly for him stuck on the curb.
This is everywhere right now. There's at least 10% of the population who need their fucking licenses confiscated and to be stuck on the bus for a year or two to cool off.
Half the reason I want the US to have at least German- or Dutch-level transit provision is so we can suspend licenses and crush cars at the drop of a pin and people won't be able to cry about being unemployed or starving to death, or, God forbid, "disparate impact".
I assure you that crushing cars is the more important part of this. In NYC people just drive anyway despite suspended licenses and thus, to no one’s surprise, comprise a disproportionate number of crash instigators.
*I'm assuming he like you are in the US. If James is elsewhere, then it might be quite different. But to answer your question, do I see an occasional car driving recklessly - yes. But not noticeably more than I did 5 years ago. Is it anything at all like many other places in the world that I've been? - no.
In the US, my observation has been that in the last decade there has been a significant increase in the number of distracted drivers more so than aggressive drivers.
More broadly, I think the bigger issue with speed in the US isn't the outliers so much as the average driver goes faster in the US which leads to the average driving situation being more dangerous which results in more deaths. That swamps the small number of reckless drivers who screw up and hit someone.
I'm glad you said this - a few years ago I had back-to-back work trips to Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and it felt like every time I crossed the road in Amsterdam I almost got hit by a bike. But Copenhagen was fine! I think it was hard to retrain my brain to look left, look right (for cars), cross and look left, look right (for bikes), then cross the bike lane.
The other infrastructure issue with e-bikes — and I say this as a fan and occasional user of them — is that absent a well-maintained and _large_ bicycling path network, they actively make bicycling worse for both traditional riders and each other.
It’s the car problem in miniature: if you’re the only car on the road, driving is _great_, but driving in rush hour traffic in even small to medium sized cities is miserable. Similarly, if you’re one of the few e-bike riders around, you can cut through cities like a knife. But any non-trivial number of them reveals instantly the hard limits of bike infrastructure that in most cases was a hostile afterthought: having dozens of e-bike riders of varying levels of skills and aggression all easily maintaining speeds of over 20mph on these paths makes for a hair-raising experience as a traditional rider or worse yet a pedestrian on shared paths. And the additional weight of the batteries makes stopping harder and crashes inevitably more injurious.
The smart thing to do here would be to start taking lanes from cars on popular arteries as e-bike traffic ramps up. My expectation is that what we’ll actually get are blanket e-bike bans in a lot of cities instead. (And that’s not even getting into the ugly failure modes of lithium ion batteries — you really should not be charging large ones inside your residence.)
I couldn’t agree more. As somebody who gets around exclusively by bike, it’s hard for me to deny that biking attracts some uniquely incompetent road users. Teenagers and DUI cases are the most obvious, but it seems like a lot of cyclists aren’t playing with a full deck.
And I don’t just mean running red lights or other straightforward traffic violations, but riding on the left side of the road, on the sidewalk, wobbling back and forth, wearing headphones, no lights…
Mercifully, by some law of nature these screwballs invariably bike in a low gear and never go more than 7 miles per hour, so they don’t overwhelm the bike infrastructure and are (usually) easy for cars and other bikes to avoid.
But more and more I’ve been having near misses with supercharged idiots on e-bikes, doing the exact same things, but 3 times faster. And it’s only going to get worse. One way or another, e-bikes are going to have to end up in a different regulatory category than either real bikes or cars.
From my experience, a lot of bikers, normal as well as e-bikes, seem to believe they aren't operating a vehicle. They are instead a fast pedestrian, and do things like pedestrians rather than cars.
They shouldn’t do things like pedestrians *or* like cars because they are neither. Or rather, there are some things they should do like pedestrians *and* cars, some like one, some like the other, and some like neither. All transportation modes have some things in common and some things that are different, and we shouldn’t try to force them into two boxes.
I always thought of the bike as something I could transform easily between vehicle and pedestrian.
When I'm on the bike, I'm a vehicle - I should stay in the bike lane, I should signal my turns, I should stop at stop lights.
But... if I really need to, I can get off the bike and walk with it - now I'm a pedestrian! (Perhaps I really don't want to move left and make a left turn as a bike across this busy intersection but I'm capable of waiting for a walk light)
E-bikes are apparently heavier (45-50 lbs vs 30-35 lbs) than normal bikes, I wonder if that's a problem for some users to just walk with them (especially if grocery laden)
As someone who has ridden a loaded touring bike weighing more than 50 pounds many thousands of miles, I can state with confidence that pushing the bike is noticeably difficult only on steep hills, when the bike is a long cargo bike or a bike with a trailer, or on terrain that is so difficult that it's hard to walk on. Otherwise... the bike has wheels! You can push it. It's not a problem.
They definitely are more difficult to walk with. I know that some come with a "walk mode" you can turn on that engages the motor at a very low speed to make it easier to carry.
The boxes exist for a reason.
Being a pedestrian doesn't require any special skill or licensing.
Being a car driver rightly does.
Maybe e-bikes should require some type of proof of basic competency and licensing?
Normally I would hate to unnecessarily bureaucratized stuff, but if e-bikes do take of and high e-cyclist density becomes a thing, maybe it makes sense?
Edit:
Maybe make the licensing requirements similar to that of motorcycles, but maybe somewhat less stringent.
I suspect (given how much more expensive they are), that the police taking their theft more seriously (because they can prove that they are stolen much more easily than regular bikes) would make a lot of ebike owners accept an obligation to register ownership and pass some sort of minimal road awareness / rules of the road test in exchange.
Even a modest tax ($20-40 pa) - if committed to spend that revenue on bike infrastructure - could be widely accepted; e-bike riders complain a lot about the lack of bike infrastructure.
Liability insurance requirements are probably needed to get insurance companies to offer products at reasonable prices - they will be (rightly) worried about adverse selection when it's optional, and also worried about a market that isn't deep enough to generate enough premiums to be worth their while.
Contrast this with the level of test that should be required to get a driving licence for a car: a theory test where you have to know the rules of all types of junction in your jurisdiction and the rights of way (e.g. when you have to yield to a bike or a pedestrian), the meaning of all the road signs (e.g. stop vs yield, all the warnings and prohibitions, parking rules, etc), a hazard perception test where you face a large number of hazardous situations in a simulator and you have to successfully identify and avoid them, and then a practical driving test of something like 45 minutes on the normal roads, managing through a variety of situations.
You should need to retake the theory test (to ensure you keep up with changes to the law) and the hazard perception test (to ensure your reflexes or vision are not deteriorating) every ten years when you renew the licence.
That's a sort of hybrid of the British and German driving tests, two of the most challenging tests in the world and also two of the safest countries in which to drive. It's also similar to many other particularly safe countries, like Japan, South Korea, or certain other European countries.
but even without crazy behaviour, increased use of bikes and increased speed differences between cyclists mean city would need more space for cyclists? Of course Mat's observation that bikes take less place to park than cars, also applies to space on the road.
Cities already need more space for cyclists, and a lot of it, even without e-bikes.
My rule is that every commuter--cyclist, motorist, pedestrian, hell even transit rider--is fully capable of doing dumb shit. It's the motorists that need to be held to the highest standard because they're the ones that can cause the most damage.
Like, I can see riding around new/returning/bad riders being super annoying but what is the realistic worst-case scenario? Absent cars, Its way, way better than even a reasonably bad accident caused by the same kind of drivers.
Most cyclists are occasional riders, they never get good at it because they do not stick to it. Because it is hard work.
New driver are dangerous too, but most new drivers becomes experienced drivers.
Evidence that an inexperienced cyclist presents more risk than an inexperienced driver would be interesting to me.
My understanding is that the bike-friendly countries (Netherlands, etc.) have actual licensing requirements for bicyclists. Correct me if I'm wrong.
You're wrong. Anyone can rent a bike in the Netherlands and ride it. I have done this.
I think all of the eu regulates no-license ebikes to 250W and 25kph (15.5 mph) max speed.
Typo. They're regulated to 25 kph, which is 15.5 mph.
thx, fixed now.
These problems definitely apply for the larger e-bikes.
I think for slower pedal-assist e-bikes (usually up to around 15mph), what they basically do is turn any person into a fit cyclist. If the infrastructure can’t sustain a lot of fit cyclists going at fast but normal speeds, then I think encouraging any kind of cycling is hopeless, it can only ever be a niche activity.
Often this just means we need to improve the infrastructure. Whenever I’m biking on a lovely trail (like the Ballona Creek path in Los Angeles or the path around town lake in Austin) I imagine what it would be like to have this as my daily commute, and then imagine what it would be like for 10,000 people to have this as their daily commute, which obviously should be a goal. None of them are sized to work for that though.
Just so we're on the same page, I presume that you anticipate that the effect of having it be 10,000 people's daily commute is that it would go from being a lovely experience to an unlovely, stressful and utiliarian one of constantly avoiding other cyclists in a free for all with more of the character of a daily grind than a pleasure ride, albeit offset by significant benefits to the health of the commuters and their capacity to get from one point to another without having either to run a car (public benefit) or sit in maddening LA traffic (private benefit), integrated over a large number of riders, thus making it net positive? EDIT: also probably would decrease the amount of per-rider subsidy dollars for bike path funding and maintenance as an additional benefit, although tbh I have no idea how much of an expenditure bike path maintenance is, especially in areas where you don't get frost heaving.
FURTHER EDIT: re-reading this I think this comes across as more tendentious than I intended to it to be -- to be clear, I don't necessarily disagree with the calculus above (in fact, I strongly suspect it would pencil out for exactly the stated reasons), I really am just trying to confirm that you were trying to juxtapose the tradeoffs of an individual commute versus the tradeoffs required to scale up the paths in question and what you perceived those tradeoffs to be, but that may have been a misreading.
Ah, sorry - no, what I anticipated as the effect of having it be 10,000 people's daily commute is that people would be constantly knocked off the edge of the path into the creek at the moments that they aren't stuck in congestion. The trails aren't anywhere near wide enough to play the role that they should ideally be able to play. Ideally they should be thinking about the widening now before there are large numbers of people relying on them for daily travel.
I have a low-power ebike and a comfort analog bike and I use Strava to record on both. My average speed on the ebike is around 12-13 mph, and on the comfort bike about 8 mph. I regularly get passed by road cyclists on both.
(My bike is a type 1 with a 250W motor, so it provides assist up to 20mph but I can’t usually reach that speed. Except on downhills, but that’s not am ebike thing.)
More people = more conflicts, but the human and other costs of even an ebike conflict pale in comparison to what we accept on a daily basis with cars.
Similar to my experience. I go more like 16-17mph on my ebike, and I am passed by strong riders on regular bikes.
Really, the risk is coming from cars, not ebikes.
I see powerful (over 1000W) ebikes in online forums, where people build them up from parts. So they exist.
Here in Seattle (lots of ebikes) I haven't seen one in the wild. Is this a real problem or just something else to be upset about?
That's what a road diet is. The most common example is to take a traditional 4 lane road (which is 2 lanes in each direction), a very dangerous setup for everyone, including cars who run a higher risk of rear ending a left turner waiting for opposing traffic to clear, and convert them to one lane in each direction, a center turn lane, and repurpose the 4th lane for two bike lanes in each direction.
As for e-bike regulation, I'm fine with something like a 20 mph speed limit on devices, and anything faster than that gets classified like any other motorcycle. I'm hopeful something like that will not cause too many people to lose their shit.
Me too if it makes people feel better.
I agree 25mph is doable on a 750W ebike with a strong rider. I agree 25mph would be dangerous on a crowded bike path. But I commute to work on a bike path and I have never once seen anyone do 25. The good club riders are faster than the ebikes.
It just seems like much ado about nothing, but a 20mph limit would be fine with me.
It is for sure true that I was doing higher speeds (average and top speed) under human power on a 16 lb carbon-fiber bike then I’ve ever hit on my ebike.
Yes, I don't have a strong opinion on the precise MPH. I'm sure someone much better at the intersection of physics and biology can determine a proper safe limit.
In my experience, as more people adopt cycling the conscientiousness of the average cyclist rises. In cities where the infrastructure makes cycling very dangerous, only people who like dangerous, risky activities (young men and people with suspended licenses, mainly) ride bikes. And they ride dangerously and riskily. In places where cycling is safe and normal people do it, the average cyclist is more likely to be a safe, normal person.
Yeah. I have met people who went to an ebike because too many DUI's.
When I was young I took too many risks on my bike. This was back when way fewer people rode bikes. At the same time I presented little risk to others riding on the street with cars. From society's standpoint it was safer keeping the young me on a bike than letting me get a car.
Now cycling is way more common and there is much more of a culture of care.
Ultimately there's a limit on how finely you can dice up a street for different users. In a lot of places the messy but probably most workable solution is to slow cars down dramatically and then share the space.
Agreed. And in certain areas, just... get rid of the cars entirely. Obviously not a workable solution for Phoenix or Atlanta, but the fact that we let people drive into downtown Manhattan, Boston and Philadelphia (all of which have street grids explicitly designed for _horses_) is just madness.
I don't disagree with congestion pricing, or even banning cars in some areas, but I do think politically its much better to stay focused on the low-hanging fruit of legalizing the construction of new housing/allowing multi-family uses of old housing - without parking minimums, especially with regard to state and federal level policy.
Redesigning the area between Girard Ave, Washington Ave, and the rivers to be non-car would be an interesting exercise, except that we'd have to raze the blocks immediately to the north and south of those boundaries and fill them with 5-story parking garages.
Better to implement congestion pricing on 76, 676, US-1, and 95, and zoned/geofenced entry pricing on the rest of the city.
Then use the money to actually unfuck SEPTA.
So... ya, completely impossible.
Honestly with Philly I think just keeping private cars off the old city / center city grid would be a massive improvement, but yeah it's hard to imagine _any_ scheme that wouldn't run into a buzzsaw of political opposition and in fact a lot of the winds seem to be blowing in the opposite direction right now.
Ehh, couple problems.
First, Manhattan's geography and transit provision lend themselves to just saying "park on the other side of the moat and take the train". It's politically impossible but physically more doable than applying that rule to Center City and Old City.
In Philly you'd basically have to commit to no private cars in Center/Old City *and parts south* between the rivers, which is borderline impossible. The infrastructure doesn't exist to support it, and building that infrastructure requires you to reengineer the city away from cars. Chicken and egg at its finest.
The second is that, due to the density of the retail businesses, in both cases we'd still need to maintain the road infrastructure, and it would see very nearly as much wear and tear in many locales (even a small box truck causes an order of magnitude more degradation to pavement than a car), but utilization would be teeny-weeny.
In that context, it makes more sense to price use in a way that allows us to wring utility from those assets rather than just constraining use.
But... if we were to set zonal entry pricing, thereby lowering traffic volumes, and reorient mass transit to serve these transportation needs, then in time we might be able to reach an endgame where every fifth street is a BRT right-of-way and the other four alternate between pedestrian-only and full vehicle access, with no long-term on-street parking at all.
Yeah, probably fair on all counts. I've been out of philly long enough that I'm only tangentially plugged in to the current state of affairs -- is Chestnut Street still a busway these days or did they give up on that?
We could always just do it like the Vietnamese and have everyone ride/drive wherever the heck they want with no rules whatsoever.
This negativity thus far likely only applies to a few cities in the US. :) Tons of unadulterated upside for majority of folks and cities.
Sure, as adoption scales, cities need to adjust and take more space from cars - same as it ever was.
Not my experience at all here in Seattle, ebike central. Ebikes on the hills are faster, but still slow (under 10mph).
I see ebikes that might go 20mph on the flat. but few, and I see club riders who go 20 as well. Eay more typical is a parent lugging groceries or a toddler on a cargo bike.
I would be fine with laws limiting assist to 20mph or even 15.5mph as they do in Europe, but what I see in these comments is a focus on outliers. Aggressive people cause problems everywhere, I'd rather see an amped-up 22 year old on an ebike (25mph topped out, oh my) than behind the wheel of a Camaro.
There's also quite a bit of variability in the handling of e-bikes. I bought the cheap one from REI which is working great to get me into the office while my metro line is closed for 7 months (thanks WMATA). But while I feel quite confident in my bike handling ability as a former racing cyclist, I really worry about new riders on a bike that accelerates powerfully and has small wheels and a high center of gravity on our bumpy roads and bike paths next to 50 MPH highways.
My dream bike to tote around the kids is a Dutch Bakfiets style with the front wheelbarrow for cargo, but that is some serious $$$$$.
Yes. Bicycles with small wheels present handling issues that inexperienced cyclist do not understand. But that isn't really an ebike thing.
Not to pick nits, but doesn’t the small wheels and low-placement of motor/battery give it a lower center of gravity?
A rock, bump, or gravel affects a small wheel way more than the center of gravity issue.
The battery and the motor weight (20-25 lbs) is very little compared to the rider.
I think the upright / step through frame design to make it universal frame size means when I ride it as a taller person much of my body weight is higher up relative to the frame. It just feels relatively less in control than a traditional bike.
Is the saddle higher on your e-bike than on a racing bike? The center of mass is where your butt is.
Good point. You needs enough clearance so the pedals don't hit the ground, the rest of center of gravity is governed by your body way more than the bike.
Well whatever it is, the handling is not great!
"the additional weight of batteries makes ... crashes more injurious" The weight of a bike plus rider, even an e-bike plus rider, is mostly rider. Say a bike weighs 25 pounds, an e-bike adds 30 pounds, and a rider weighs 175 pounds. So crashes with an e-bike have 15% more energy. That's more or less in the noise.
One of the dumber parts of the struggle to get rid of parking requirements is that cities will often grant exemptions to them if developers grant certain concessions, so now groups that benefit from those concessions fight to keep them. So now we have some "Affordable Housing" organizations fighting to keep them.
Even after reading this, I still don't get e-bikes.
In my 20's I rode a motorcycle and didn't have a car. I liked riding bikes and thought having a motorcycle would be a counter-cultural thing to do. When you ride a motorcycle, you have to wear a helmet in my state. While carrying that helmet, people will approach you unbidden to tell you how a loved one of theirs was killed or maimed on a motorcycle. This leads many, myself included, to buy leather jackets, chaps, boots, and various armors.
Once, I strapped my backpack to the back of my motorcycle poorly, and it fell off but dangled by a bungee for a short distance while being pulled across the pavement at low speed. It was absolutely shredded. This made an impression on me.
Eventually, I decided that rather than don all of this uncomfortable gear and still suffer considerable worry and discomfort, I'd sell my motorcycle and get a sedan. It was a vast improvement on nearly every front excluding the coolness and fun fronts.
I still bike commuted for years in sun, rain and winter, but eventually I had one close call too many. The roads get more and more congested, and all it takes is one idiot to gift you a permanent and/or serious injury. I gave it up with reservation.
So I see e-bikes, and I say, what is this? Is this a slow motorcycle? If so, why isn't this person wearing at least the safety gear of a person on a moped? Why is this slow motorcycle operating on the same pedestrian path my toddler is wobbling down? In the biking community there is a stigma against riding down the sidewalk "like a child". The e-bike community seems to be holding on to the illusion that they are bikers, not motor vehicles. But if you operate at motor vehicle speed, you need to be in the road like a car. Stop operating your e-bike on bike paths "like a child".
The e-bikers might reply, "well, I don't feel safe in the road!" And they would be wise to say that. They can't maintain the speed of traffic around them generally, so they force traffic to take risky actions to get around them. One often has the same trouble on a road bike. In the best case scenario where they are keeping pace with traffic, they are usually doing so in sandals, shorts, and a tee-shirt.
So I don't know, it's a free country I guess, ride your ebike. Yet, if someone offered me a motorcycle that I could ride and get light exercise, I'd still say no. I'll get my light exercise in a way that is less likely to kill or maim me. Meanwhile, please keep your motor vehicle off pedestrian paths. Be an adult! Like, if one saw a guy riding his motorcycle at 15-20 mph down my pedestrian path, one would surely think, "that guy is an asshole." That's what I think about you when I see you on a one-wheel or a e-bike anywhere but in a road for motor vehicles.
I'll wrap this up by saying that my old boss, the man that convinced me to not be a wimp and buy the motorcycle in the first place, wrecked his motorcycle last year and lost a foot. He walks on a prosthetic now, but it causes him significant pain, and he's suffering depression as a result. A truck with a trailer pulled out in front of him or something. Might have been the car drivers fault, might not have been, but either way, a small error and a moment of lack of focus cost a man his foot.
What makes motorcycles so dangerous is their speeds. Traveling at 60-70 mph without the armor of a full-sized car is nuts.
But, at 20 mph, the risk level is much less, and you don't need all the fancy gear that motorcycle riders use. Assuming, of course, that there are safe places to ride at a 20 mph place, without 40 mph cars hitting you.
"They can't maintain the speed of traffic around them generally, so they force traffic to take risky actions to get around them."
They do not force traffic to take risks to get around them. If you cannot overtake a vehicle safely, then you must slow down to the speed of that vehicle until it is safe to do so.
If you don't like that or find it frustrating, then you need to control yourself; if you can't control yourself, you should surrender your license, sell your car and stop driving because you are a danger to everyone else on the road.
Those are fine words, and I wish they were true.
Having been a biker, I'm quite considerate. Most drivers are not.
For those words to have meaning, someone would have to enforce them. Sadly, our police force has given up on enforcing traffic laws in my burg. Even less are they concerned for the welfare of some weirdo biker.
Have you ever been a pedestrian and found the behavior you are chiding me to observe to be observed by all drivers on the road? As a pedestrian in traffic, if even 10% don't follow your edicts, the pedestrian is in danger.
I'll grant you my language was colloquial. Car drivers are not forced. They are 'compelled'. Compelled by selfishness, ignorance, ambivalence, malevolence or distraction; the reason doesn't matter if you're the pedestrian in traffic.
100% feel this. I understand people’s true point that cars are the statistically most dangerous thing to pedestrians, but in my every day lived experience cars don’t zoom past me on the sidewalk at a speed that could kill me one second after a brief ring of their bell. Regular bikers doing this was bad enough
If you liked riding a motorcycle, I think you'd like riding an ebike! For me, it's the difference between a 10 minute effortless and a 15 minute regular effort bike trip to the grocery store. That doesn't seem like much, but from a planning perspective it's like the difference between a 10 minute walk and 10 minute jog: with one you're going to be walking around hot and sweaty at the end.
For the safety piece you can slice it lots of different ways. My parents are big road cyclers, and when I got my first motorcycle they were aghast I would do something so dangerous, and I was aghast they'd been riding on the roadways with no more protection than a foam helmet and spandex. Hitting a patch of gravel going downhill will take you out either way, but I'm going to be sliding on kevlar with 100% of my skin covered.
To answer your question on if it's a fast bike / slow motorcylce I think the class 1/2/3 ebike classification is a good start, but needs a lot more enforcement. Class 1/2 ebikes that are mostly pedal assist and limited to 20mph should be able to use a bike path, and class 3 ebikes that are limited at 25mph+ with mostly throttle control should be roadway only, imo. No one should be riding bikes on sidewalks, too.
I guess the question of fast bike vs slow motorcycle was rhetorical, as I have my mind made up. But a better analogy would be that an e-bike is like a poorly maintained moped. A moped with a poorly functioning motor and on which all of the lights/signals that make it street legal have fallen into disrepair. That moped would not be welcome on a bike path. Nor would it be safe to operate on the street.
As Matt said, an e-bike is a bicycle that climbs hills easier. I have a bike and an ebike, live around a lot of hills, and I'm 63. I won't commute on my bike, there is a killer hill and I'm just not up to it. I do commute on my ebike, it tames the hill. An ebike is not a slow motorcycle, at all. A Honda C70 Passport is a slow motorcycle (I had one). A C70 drives with cars, it takes up a lane, you have to match prevailing speed. An ebike rides off to the side so cars can pass (20mph is fast for an ebike) or in a bike lane.
An ebike is a bicycle that helps you climb hills. Is it safe? Not really, neither are regular bicycles. More dangerous than a regular bike? No, about the same. A safety comparison between ebikes and motorcycles is a category error.
If you want safety use a car or transit.
If you want excitement use a motorcycle.
If you want exercise use an ebike or a bicycle.
"They can't maintain the speed of traffic around them generally, so they force traffic to take risky actions to get around them. One often has the same trouble on a road bike. In the best case scenario where they are keeping pace with traffic, they are usually doing so in sandals, shorts, and a tee-shirt."
This sounds like a screed against bicycles, and I have heard it before. Plenty of motorists don't like bikes on the road, never have and never will.
Also there is no "best-case scenario" where bikes keep pace with traffic. They can't and they don't. ebike or regular bike they just don't have the power.
It's not a slow motorcycle, it's a fast bicycle. The pedal assist bikes Matt is talking about top out at 15-20 mph. This is slower than a quick pedal powered cyclist. If you would allow a road cyclist, you should allow 750W e-bike
Yes, real cyclists in training pass me on my ebike. I might be pedaling 200W and the motor is 200W, 400W at the tire. They are fit!
On a steep hill it goes to 250W (me) plus 550W from the motor. That is 800W at 7mph. Even pro cyclists cannot sustain 800W for long.
I am a long time bike commuter in Minneapolis, and I'm noticing more e-bikes out there on the bike paths. Like other commenters, I have a few safety concerns. But, to be honest, I am probably biased because I find it irritating to be passed by some out of shape person who isn't even pedaling. Some pettiness may be coloring my perspective. So I try to be a little more fair-minded.
The truth is that riding any kind of bike is a fairly dangerous activity, but, on balance, getting more people out there using bikes to get around has got to be a good thing. Safety concerns can be addressed. For example, maybe ebikes could have speed limiters that prevent them going more than maybe 15 mph. Or maybe the electric assist automatically turns off when the bike is going downhill.
And we are far from having bike lanes that are too crowded for both ebikes and regular bikes. More and more people who bike regularly should lead to more development of safer places to ride, like protected bike lanes.
(Now, when it comes to e-mountain bikes on dirt trails built for human powered bikes, I embrace my pettiness. I have zero patience for people who spend $10,000 on what is effectively a motorbike because they are too lazy to huff and puff up the hills with the rest of us.)
I get what you are saying about the irritation. On my ebike I get passed by club riders, and I could use more assist and pass them, but I don't because that would be rude. I get that.
At the same time I have yet to see the mythical ebiker on a hopped-up machine terrorizing other cyclist on the bike path.
Inclusivity is best. Cycling is helped by more cyclists, even if they are on ebikes. Cycling culture should be about consideration, that means no whizzing close by pedestrians, ebike or no ebike.
I feel similarly. I bought a good bike for commuting and riding longer distances for recreation and then the pandemic came and the need to commute went away, but I do ride for hours on our very nice long bike trail that runs along the American River and I just find it strange how many ebikes are out there on a weekend because it seems like recreation but they are not really pedaling and when you pass them they seem to be annoyed and speed up and it's just strange to see someone barely pedaling and going kind of fast -- I think they make perfect sense for commuting and there are plenty of folks who use that trail to commute during the week but I just kind of wish on the weekend that the trail was for bikers and runners and walkers (I find the roller bladers kind of irritating because they take up so much space but I grudgingly acknowledge that they should also be welcome) and not for vehicles with motors. But I don't have a good reason for this -- it is probably pettiness.
I think about it like this: Would it be ok for someone to be riding a motorcycle with you on that path? What about a scooter? What about a broken down scooter that could only do 20 mph and had no turn signals or lights? How about a 2-stroke, gas powered moped?
My answer to all of these is: no, it would not be ok. So where is the line that separates an e-bike, or even an electric one-wheel, from these clearer examples of prohibited traffic?
My answer is: a class 1 (20 MPH, pedal-assist) ebike is fine everywhere a regular bicycle is, for all the reasons listed above -- normal bikes routinely reach this speed among even the moderately-fit.
A class 2 (throttle-controlled bike) is a motorcycle regardless of top speed and should be treated as such (or as a moped, if such a thing is licensed in your jurisdiction). Maybe that means it's allowed on a multi-mode path if it's got a speed limiter, or maybe not. No strong opinion there. Where I live, throttle-controlled vehicles (ebikes, mopeds, dirt bikes, etc.) are not permitted on multi-mode paths, though in practice I don't see much enforcement on electric bikes (vs gas-powered bikes, where there definitely is enforcement).
A class (28 MPH, pedal-assist) ebike is the grey zone. Most cyclists (if you include occasional and recreational cyclists) do not achieve this speed except on downhills, and it's far in excess of what's reasonable on sidewalks or on multi-use trails that aren't bicycle-only. I think these should probably not be allowed on trails/sidewalks where pedestrians are allowed, but I also think it's clearly a grey area and people will have differing opinions.
Good breakdown.
I've commute biked on human power ever since I was a teenager, and since I'm Matt's age, I'm starting to realize that at some point, hopefully not too soon, I'll need an e-bike just because I'll get too old for a regular one.
Matt, I can’t believe you didn’t include a footnote with the number of shoes your grandfather found people needed. Please tell us.
At least 2.
Surely it's more like 1.9 -- the average number of feet per person is less than 2 after all. (Now I'm imagining a ration coupon regime in which everyone receives two footwear coupons -- one per shoe -- and there's an active market for spare coupons from amputees and other people with fewer than two feet.)
There's a lot that could be said about this topic, much of it by people with more information than I have, although I did have the experience of using a non-E bike (exclusively) for nine months in the late aughts, but the three chief concerns that I think would benefit form being addressed beyond better route infrastructure (which many commenters are correctly already discussing and is obviously incredibly important for both safety and convenience / desirability) are:
(1) Better prosecution of bike thievery. Having an expensive but easily (and frequently) stolen capital asset is a huge problem and a massive disincentive to own a bike in an urban area. This seems like both an enforcement and a legislative problem.
(2) Parking for bicycles: especially with thievery as a problem, but even without, there's just not a great way to *store* bikes at most destinations, whether commercial or business, and they're enough of a size and hassle to make "grin and bear it" or similar ad-hoc solutions like wrestling a bike onto the elevator and keeping it in one's office impractical
(3) The Achilles' heel of the bicycle is that it is *incredibly* ill-suited to carrying heavy and/or bulky items (let alone other people), but you're not going to find a more efficient way in either monetary or time savings to buy paper towels than a Costco run. This doesn't make bikes a poor choice for commuting in instances where that isn't a concern, and so there can be beneficial effects of replacing the marginal car trip with the marginal bike trip, but it makes the bike impractical as a car replacement to the incredibly wide class of transportation problems that aren't "depart and return as a single person who is at most lightly laden." Certainly lots of trips do fit that bill -- e.g., office worker commutes -- but the upper bound of bike utility for transport just doesn't seem high enough to have much of an effect on product-based commerce (but maybe it could for service-based ones catering to individuals?)
In the modern world, I don't consider Costco runs sufficient justification to buy a car anymore. Anything you could possibly buy at Costco, you can order online and have it delivered to you. Even if you pay more, you're still saving huge amounts of money compared to car ownership.
My personal opinion is that, if you want to buy a car (at least, if you live in a city), the justification for the purchase needs to be based on experiences, rather than things. For example, hiking, skiing, visiting family and friends at the opposite end of town, are all good reasons to own a car. Carrying paper towels home from a store half a mile away. Not so much.
Car clubs (zipcar) that let you rent a car by the hour are a great solution to the Costco run or the IKEA run.
If you're doing that sort of run more than once a month, then you might start thinking that owning a car makes sense - but also, who the hell does that sort of run more than once a month anyway?
Bike theft is absolutely a huge problem towards more widespread adoption. E-bikes especially are targets because they're lightweight (read as "can be tossed in the back of a pickup"), expensive, and easy to part out or resell.
Los Angeles has a new law that makes the parting-out of bikes in public illegal as an excuse to crack down on homeless chop shops, but e-bikes have valuable enough components that it can be done by people with a business or house. Some newer e-bikes have GPS tracking installed in their valuable components, and AirTags and the like are a good solution for even cheap bikes. I hope law enforcement adapts to what's going to be a common situation of "Someone stole my bike, this is where GPS says it is, can you investigate ASAP before the tracker is destroyed".
On point #2, these style of bike racks are really underrated as to how many they can park in a modest amount of space.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQFGcYGqv2iA_Z_sRtScM9lrfX65jW7eno3FQ&usqp=CAU
Those bike racks suck and are terrible. If you see those racks in the wild, you'll see cyclists park parallel to them, because if you park in the way the rack is (mis)designed, your bike will tip over.
Staples. Staples are the answer. Not bike racks that suck and were designed by people who don't use bike racks. https://huntco.com/staple-bike-rack
Huh, I've never had any problems with the racks I mentioned. The racks you mention are fine too, though I wonder about the difference in bikes per unit of area.
Do you typically load up your bike with groceries or any other kind of load? Do you have a front rack, basket or handlebar bag? Once you put a load on the bike, it has a tendency to twist and fall on that kind of rack.
Yes I do, saddlebag style panniers. Sometimes it can take a little bit of effort but rarely has it been insurmountable for me.
Great article, but you’re missing causality here:
> The problem is that the technological transition to the Automobile Era coincided with the rise of a very prescriptive land use planning regime.
Instead it’s the rise of cars that created an ever more restrictive land-use, transportation, and planning regime. There are many reasons for this but the biggest is that cars are outrageously dangerous and car crashes kill tons of people. In the 20’s they put up monuments in a bunch of cities memorializing all the children slain by reckless motorists.
But cars are useful, and the motorist lobby successfully engineered regulatory capture over the entire transportation/land-use world by positioning the entire problem as obsolete development patterns and careless pedestrians, and technocrats of the era responded by building stricter and stricter prescriptions to require what we now think of as “normal suburbia” to be built, and to be the only thing that can be built, on the theory that it would be better for everyone.
This same era of technocrats later instituted redlining, saw the freeways as a convenient mechanism to demolish and wall off the black and brown neighborhoods, and bulldozed a lot of what was left to build the notorious “tower in a park” housing projects. Really a profoundly terrible legacy.
We still see the very aggressive lobbying against public transport (like light rail) sponsored by fossil fuel
I'd like to see some links, if you can. Does the fossil fuel industry really see public transport as such a threat that it needs to lobby against it?
No personal experience, living an ocean away, but I remember the NYT article and found the Phoenix example as well.
Nashville: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html
Phoenix: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/26/koch-activists-phoenix-ban-light-rail
Neither of those demonstrate “lobbying against public transport (like light rail) sponsored by fossil fuel.”
What would amount to an adequate proof (if this doesn't)?
You could start with the phrase “sponsored by fossil fuel.” That sounds like literal nonsense.
There’s also the Guardian story that admits the opposition is local and not at all due to “fossil fuel.”
Depends on which public transit you're talking about. If it's diesel powered and isn't ridden all that much, it's actually increasing use of fossil fuels, and should make Big Oil quite happy.
There’s a lot here that I agree with, as a bike commuter of over 15 years. One topic that goes unaddressed is space usage on the ROAD. It’s taken forever to get solid bicycling infrastructure in a few cities. Introducing a bunch of electric scooters and bikes creates a third mode of traffic - going much faster than the bicyclists a lot of the time, and too slow for the cars. It is a markedly more dangerous commute with them on the road. There are a lot of accidents.
My city is now considering banning the scooter rentals because they’re a real hazard, and not only because of space usage. Due to the low barrier to entry, they’re often ridden by people who have no idea what they’re doing, are drunk, and don’t wear helmets. (This is also a problem with by-the-ride bike rental, but the physical work involves operates as a natural constraint on numbers.)
Why does the city care if people do or don’t wear a helmet, assuming they have a private insurance plan?
For the same reason the state requires people to wear seat belts. Tis a bad thing for there to be more head injuries...
Not wearing seatbelts at least has a negative externality because your unrestrained body might damage other passengers in the car. There are no such externalities for bike helmets for people with private insurance plans. If Blue Shield says I should have a helmet I'll put one on but the city government? None of their business.
There's still a negative externality, though: Joe and Bob have both been paying insurance premiums. They both get in accidents. Joe was wearing a helmet and only needed stitches. Bob wasn't wearing a helmet and required $1.8 million in healthcare and rehab over a three year period. And will never pay taxes again because he can't work.
I'd say Bob's an example of a negative externality.
The state claiming your current labor in the form of taxes is bad enough. The state claiming an interest in your future labors and restricting you from making decisions that might reduce your future productivity is just Orwellian.
If it bothers you, I guess you can ignore the productivity part and concentrate on the healthcare part. Harm minimization policies are fairly standard in all developed countries, the most prominent examples of which are pigovian taxes on alcohol and tobacco.
That's between me and my private insurance company. I also have life and disability insurance to cover this exact scenario.
It's not really *only* between you and the insurance company. Although healthcare capacity can obviously be expanded over time, at any one snapshot in time, that resources is finite, and so your preventable head injury taxes the capacity of the system writ large, thereby weakening it for others (however imperceptibly).
I think one can make a principled argument for the libertarian position in the hypothetical we're discussing, mind you. Truly I do. But what you can't plausibly do is make the case that helmet mandates have no basis in terms of rational, cost/benefit analysis. Better just to say the material benefit doesn't justify the massive assault on freedom.
That is absolutely not an externality. The costs and benefits are internalized by Bob here. You may as well say that me not wanting to date someone is an externality, because I am depriving someone of contact with me.
If the insurance company wished, they can give different premium rates for different behavior — perhaps they can require you install a camera on the bike in exchange for a steep discount. You have an argument for externalities in healthcare if and only if we have public funding of healthcare.
>>That is absolutely not an externality.<<
Reducing bad head injuries *absolutely* reduces the strain on the healthcare system, even if every single person buys robust health insurance. This isn't controversial. Think about it.
If you want to suggest a term other than "externality" fire away—I'm not hung up on semantics.
I can appreciate this perspective, while also stating that as a society we have rejected this approach. You don't just have to wear a seatbelt if there are other passengers, but also if you are alone. Which is one of many examples where the state requires you to take personal safety precautions.
Not everyone has rejected this. Bike helmets are not mandatory in most cities and seat belts are not mandatory in NH. They're also not mandatory in the Netherlands despite them having the largest biking population per capita in the world.
This article and the comments are among the most boring on this blog. This comment no exception.
If they were riding safely, I would care less. But as a citizen, I have a preference for not having bloody brains all over the street because an idiot scootered against traffic.
If we want to regulate vehicles that cause bloody brains all over the street, we need to look right past those scooters and at cars. Drivers are the killers here, not scooter riders.
How many bike injuries have you seen in your life? 99.9% of them don't involve any "bloody brains", unlike car accidents, simply because the speeds are too low.
I’ve seen quite a few, having cycled thousands of miles. Most experienced cyclist wear helmets, though, which dramatically reduces the rate of brain injury. There have been some very ugly incidents involving drunken scooter riders in my city. Perhaps I should mention that the city is considering this ban in the very busy tourist district. They don’t care what you do in your cul-de-sac or residential neighborhood. But yeah, the accidents are serious and a significant quality of life issue in the city.
How many of those bike accidents have involved "bloody brains all over the street"?
What is your city, and how many accidents involving drivers hitting pedestrians and cyclists have there been in the time that there have been some ugly incidents with drunken scooters? How many pedestrians and cyclists have been killed by drivers, while you were worrying about scooters?
After the introduction of Lime, Byrd, and the other e-scooters in my city circa 2019, ER intake went up by some rather large number due to accidents involving e-scooter riders. Doesn’t seem good to have ER beds tied up w riders of these things.
The crowding issue is a problem, but I'm optimistic that every new rider is one more advocate for new and better bike lanes. Cities weren't redesigned around cars until they went from a toy for the rich to transportation for the masses. It's not going to be overnight but ebikes are growing the share of frequent riders.
Yes absolutely! Let’s hope so.
I think some numbers would be useful here.
* A normal parking space is...180 square feet? That's the smallest number I am seeing on google. That's just the parking space. That's doesn't account for the other space in the parking lot the cars to dive through -- more than doubling the space needed for each sparking space.
* The average rental apartment seems to be under 900 square feet.
* This suggests that a 5 story apartment building would need twice as much space on the ground, simply to to allow for the parking spaces -- assuming just one car per apartment. (If you look at aeriel views of apartment developments, you see that the parking lots are VASTLY larger than the buildings themselves.
Honestly, I think that Matt has failed to connect these numbers to height limits on buildings. When the expectation is street parking, there's some efficiency on space but there is also a hard upper limit on available spaces. Street parking in Brooklyn probably only allows for like...two floors of apartments (at one car/apartment). Maybe three?
Why would you assume one car per apartment when there are ample ways to get around in Brooklyn without owning a car?
On Saturday, my wife and I took our three kids to Yankee Stadium to see NYCFC destroy the "New York" Red Bulls, and we didn't want to take our infant on the subway, so we got a ZipCar.
On Sunday, we met friends at a park, and it was a little far for my three-year-old to walk, so we took the bus.
This morning, I rode a Citi Bike to the subway.
Cars are convenient. I might get one some day. But I've lived in Brooklyn for 15 years without one.
Figure that a normal parking space is 350-380 square feet, counting circulation. But we need housing for people, not housing for cars. If someone wants to own a car, fine. If someone wants to build apartments with parking for cars, fine. But we have no business telling developers that they need to provide more parking than they think they can sell to their buyers/renters. Charge for street parking, let developers decide how much parking to provide, and let drivers figure it out.
Love that e-bikes are part of the discussion even in these circles! I’ve been riding them for 6 years now. Early adopter because I live in East Harlem and there were tons of delivery guys on them and I just thought they seemed cool. For me it was all about how quickly I could get to the pool where I swim (1.5 miles away) and volleyball leagues around the city (.5 to 2 miles away). The ebike proved amazing for both. I had kids 5 years ago and quickly started bringing my daughter everywhere (daycare and errands) on the bike. When we had our second, we got the radwagon and it has become our “bus” for getting the kids everywhere. A couple things make this doable for us: 1) we live on the first floor of our condo building. Bringing these big heavy bikes in and out can be hard for people who live in walk ups. We need to build better safety storage for bikes. I leave the bikes out during the day (locked) and then bring in at the end of the day. 2) we have bike lanes all around East Harlem and there are so many bikes that people GENERALLY are pretty respectful of bikes.
I was always struck that the Dutch don’t wear helmets despite being a bike culture. Then I realized that when everyone rides bikes, car drivers are also bike riders and they are very aware of bikes as a result. You need less safety mechanisms. This is becoming more true in NYC, but still far from widespread enough. The white bikes you see on corners are memorials of where deaths on bikes have happened and they are far to frequent to be comfortable.
The radwagon is so popular and cool that I use it to bring my daughter and two of her friends from school to their afterschool program. Saving other parents the trip and also getting them there super quickly.
I rode motorcycles growing up (stopped when I moved to NYC 20 years ago after a few close calls) and I think the speed and power of an ebike feels relaxed compared to the motorcycles I used to ride. But I’m very aware of how frightening they can be to pedestrians and bike riders due to the speed. Hopefully this awareness builds are more people ride and it becomes more common.
Finally - alternate street parking is like my biggest complaint about NYC. It seems SOOOO dumb to charge nothing for something so valuable. To take such valuable space for cars when garage parking is $300-750/month (more in some places) is just insane. Tax revenue, additional bikes lanes. More spaces for outdoor dining. More pedestrian spaces, less congestion. Who advocates for free parking?
>>Who advocates for free parking?<<
Non-affluent New Yorkers who can't find $7k in their annual budget for private parking, and the politicians who depend on their votes. That's who.
This past summer Matt Y. detailed a proposal that might address the constituent capture issues buttressing the insane policy of giving away precious city street space. He was talking about DC and other cities with similar, resident parking permit programs. Not sure if it would work in the context of NYC.(No permits there, right? You don't even have to have NY plates, IIRC).
My landlady is a judge. She has her nanny do the "street-cleaning shuffle" for her every week, which involves sitting in the car to look like you are going to move it when the street-cleaning comes by so you don't have to give up your free parking spot.
unfortunately it isn’t non-affluent parkers (at least not in my neighborhood). Here, people basically pay someone (less than garage parking, but not an insignificant amount), to move their car. We have a “fix a flat” on our block and the guys who run it, who are basically out front of the shop all day, basically run the parking on our street. They collect money from some people to move the cars and they provide it free to others who are “part of the community”. We actually got this offered to us, as we are super friendly, but we declined because we pay for parking at a garage nearby and it is fairly reasonable and we prefer that the service be for people who need it more.
There are no permits in NYC. You just have to move your car for 1.5 hours every two days. That is the “use tax” - and it is incredibly inefficient.
Sure. I didn't mean to denigrate the socioeconomic attributes of your neighborhood. Instead of "non-affluent" I guess I should have written something like "price conscious."
Dutch & helmets: there's another side to it. I grew up in the Netherlands and have practically biked all my life. When people starting using helmets (1995?), this felt incredibly wimpy. But for me, skiing with a helmet, I've always done that but I started in my 30s. Around that time, I met a lifelong skier and she thought skiers with helmets were wimps while biking with a helmet made perfect sense.
I like this explanation better!
Love the article. Our cargo e-bike has been a game changer in our ability to be a one-car family. And tons of them are now appearing at our kids’ school.
Parking minimums are slowly being torn down in our city — can’t wait to see where this all goes.
Has Matt's post got you interested in ebiking? I'm 63, I live in a hilly area, I have an ebike, and I'm an engineer who understands what matters in an ebike.
Matt is 100% correct that the biggest benefit of an ebike is climbing hills. If I commuted around Amsterdam I wouldn't bother. With a regular bike I go 15mph on the flat, double the power on an ebike and go 20, it makes a few minutes difference on a commute. But climbing hills, it is really hard to climb a long hill on a bicycle! So if you live where it is flat and you don't ride your bike you might not ride your new ebike either. But if hills are killing you it makes a huge difference.
So what ebike to buy? The expensive ones put the motor at the cranks (called mid-drive). This is best for climbing steep hills because shifting gears helps you and the motor, both can spin faster even as the bike slows down. Cheaper ones put the motor in the hub, when you slow on a hill the motor slows too, it generates less power and can overheat if you push it too hard. So mid-drive is better, but hub drive is cheaper. The decision comes to hills. If your area has mild hills hub drive can be fine (more on this to come), if you have steep long hills mid-drive might be necessary. How do you know if you have steep hills? If you have a derailleur bike and on the hills you shift to 1st and it is still hard going you have steep hills. If 1st climbs the hill OK but you are now at walking speed and balancing the bike gets hard you have steep hills. If your experience is less severe hub drive is probably fine.
Another thing that costs money is a torque sensor. This is a sensor at the cranks that senses how hard you are pushing on the pedals. With a torque sensor the ebike multiplies your effort. It is pretty wonderful, like riding a bike except you are way more fit. Cheaper ebikes drop the torque sensor and use a simpler sensor that monitors how fast the cranks are turning. If you start climbing a hill a torque sensor ebike can tell and it puts on more power. A crank speed ebike can't tell. To get more power you manually increase the assist on the control screen. In the end a torque sensor feels better but both work. Mid-drives tend to have torque sensors built-into the drive. Hub drive torque sensors are a separate and most hub drive ebikes go for the cheaper solution, but this is just market pressure, torque sensor hub drive exists and works fine.
If you buy a hub drive the manufacturer will tout a top speed. You might think 25mph is better than 20mph, but the opposite is true. In real biking the only time you go 25 is down a hill and you don't need the motor. A hub motor geared for a 25mph top speed is worse on the hills, on a hill the motor wants a low gear for the same reason you do. An ideal hub motor top speed would be 18mph. 18mph is plenty fast on a bicycle and the lower gearing really helps on the hills. But you won't find an 18mph hub drive bike, 18mph top speed sounds lame and 25mph sounds better in the showroom.
E-bikers don't have a natural political constituency to advocate for them, either. The traditional bicycling advocacy groups tend to be dominated by the spandex set, and are at best ambivalent to e-bikes.
E-bikers, get involved in your local bike advocacy group! We need supply side reform (more bike infrastructure) not rationing and austerity (banning e-bikes from existing trails).
Absent in this discussion are kick scooters (esp. electrical kick scooters): here, they are mostly operated through sharing apps and they seem to fill a big need but create a mess as their users manage to act like very fast pedestrians on the pavements, chaotic cyclists on cycle paths and erratic or near-suicidal drivers on the road.
100%. In our neighborhood e-scooters are taking off with teenagers (who can’t yet drive, don’t have their own car, etc). Lots of them around the high school.
As long as they’re being safe, this could be a game-changer for parents.
I wish I had more time to talk about this subject, because it's one that's very dear to my heart, so all I'll say as a top level comment for now is that I'm so excited that you've gotten into cycling, Matt, and I'm glad you acknowledge how scarce space needs to be reallocated to not make everything so dang car-centric.
Unpopular opinion: The aggressive biking and biking setups in Amsterdam makes being a pedestrian more dangerous. Copenhagen seemed to have a better model.
When you say “more dangerous” you should be clear about the comparison. You mean more dangerous than Copenhagen but surely less dangerous than New York, let alone your average American suburb.
Right. Cars are the most dangerous thing to pedestrians, and it's not even close.
Yeah I mean there’s basically no way being hit by a pedal bike is going to result in death, whereas American roads are currently full on mad max since the pandemic.
You must have watched a different movie than I did, because I regularly walk streets and don't experience anything like the Mad Max that I saw.
Um... you've not noticed large numbers people driving like complete and utter maniacs in literally every kind of setting?
I was on US-1, which is one of a handful of corridors in PA with significant camera enforcement for signals and speed limits, and some dude in what appeared to be a very dinged up Dodge Charger was dodging in and out of traffic at around 85 MPH (speed limit 45), with a plate cover so dark it was basically opaque.
Because of the traffic lights I actually was basically keeping pace with him for a while, then he finally ducked around a cop and gunned it... when he realized his mistake he mounted the grass median between the main and auxiliary roadways to try to run.
At 60-80 MPH and a very shallow angle of approach... a Charger has 4ish inches of ground clearance and the Philly PD Explorers have 8 inches, so this ended badly for him stuck on the curb.
This is everywhere right now. There's at least 10% of the population who need their fucking licenses confiscated and to be stuck on the bus for a year or two to cool off.
Half the reason I want the US to have at least German- or Dutch-level transit provision is so we can suspend licenses and crush cars at the drop of a pin and people won't be able to cry about being unemployed or starving to death, or, God forbid, "disparate impact".
I assure you that crushing cars is the more important part of this. In NYC people just drive anyway despite suspended licenses and thus, to no one’s surprise, comprise a disproportionate number of crash instigators.
*I'm assuming he like you are in the US. If James is elsewhere, then it might be quite different. But to answer your question, do I see an occasional car driving recklessly - yes. But not noticeably more than I did 5 years ago. Is it anything at all like many other places in the world that I've been? - no.
In the US, my observation has been that in the last decade there has been a significant increase in the number of distracted drivers more so than aggressive drivers.
More broadly, I think the bigger issue with speed in the US isn't the outliers so much as the average driver goes faster in the US which leads to the average driving situation being more dangerous which results in more deaths. That swamps the small number of reckless drivers who screw up and hit someone.
It's not common, but there absolutely are instances of pedestrians being killed in collisions with bicycles. Here's one from just last month: https://thevillagesun.com/chelsea-man-44-dies-after-being-struck-by-hit-and-run-cyclist-police
I'm glad you said this - a few years ago I had back-to-back work trips to Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and it felt like every time I crossed the road in Amsterdam I almost got hit by a bike. But Copenhagen was fine! I think it was hard to retrain my brain to look left, look right (for cars), cross and look left, look right (for bikes), then cross the bike lane.
In Amsterdam, pedestrians are far more at risk from cyclist than in Copenhagen, IMO.